I spend a lot of time in second hand book shops. There is something magical about reading a book that already has someone else’s notes in it, that has been underlined and thumbed with an intimacy that speaks volumes about the person or people who have read those words before.
I found one a few years ago that is called ‘Leadership is an Art’ by Max DePree. It is not a along book, neither is it new so it does not have the more modern language of recent management or leadership ‘speak’, ‘The seven secrets of great leaders’ or ‘The 15 steps to being a creative leader’ or even ‘How to be a successful leader’. In its stead it makes excellent use of ‘the narrative’; the story telling about what Leadership involves and the ‘Tribal Story Telling’ that sometimes happens around the water cooler or in the lunch room. There are some amazing stories that speak about how a company or its leadership can be successful without resorting to a list of ‘do this and you will be successful’; very refreshing.
He tells the story of a city in America who would invite business leaders from around the country to look at their state and invite them to transfer their operations there or do more business with them. As part of this promotion he talks about one committee where they were discussing how they could dress up a particular facility that needed some dressing up. Some well meaning individual suggested that they put pink ice in the urinals. Strange though this may sound they were quite serious but the writer took it into another and related a question that was asked of him as one of the main leaders in his company; “what is one of the most difficult things that you personally need to work on?” His response was ‘The Interception of Entropy’[1]
He was using the word in a very loose way and for him he explained that what leaders need to learn is to recognize are the signals of impending deterioration. He then goes on to list a number of things that are signs of this condition. Among them he talked
· A tendency toward superficiality
· No longer having the time for celebration and ritual
· When people stop telling ‘tribal stories’ or cannot understand them
· When problem makers outnumber problem solvers
· Leaders who seek to control rather than liberate
· Manuals
· Leaders who rely on structures instead of people
· Etc etc
The list goes on and if we were looking at some of the organizations that we are familiar with I guess we could come up with a lot more. His final statement is that we need to beware of putting ‘Pink Ice in the Urinals’.
Those of us who have positions of leadership in an organization could take note of some of these signs and address them before it is too late and we daily fill our own urinals with pink ice.
So much has been said about leadership that a single definition is hard to come by but one of Max DePree quotes resonated with me, in that he simplifies it into two responsibilities. The first is to define reality and the last is to say thank you’. How simple is that? But he goes on to say that in between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor; that sums up the progress of an artful leader.
[1] In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable.
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